Servings and Portions

May 2, 2009

The terms serving and portion are often used to mean the same thing, but they’re not.  The difference is important because confusion around serving and portion sizes often leads to over eating.

Serving

A serving is a specific measurement of food that delivers defined amounts of key nutrients.  Serving size is usually determined by the Nutrition Facts Label on a package or container of food.  A serving size may be measured in cups, teaspoons, one or more units, ounces, etc.  The nutrition label will state the size of a single serving, the nutrients for a single serving, and the number of servings in a package.  It’s important to read nutrition labels carefully because manufacturers will often try to make unhealthy foods look better by disguising serving sizes.

Consider this example of the Nutrition Facts label from a package of Oreo cookies.  The serving size is listed as 34grams with 160 calories per serving, 7 grams of fat, and 25 grams of carbohydrates.  At first glance a serving of Oreos doesn’t seem too bad — a serving here and there certainly couldn’t hurt.

Based on this information, you decide to have a serving of Oreos.  How many Oreos are in one serving?  The label says 34 grams, but it doesn’t tell you how many cookies.  This serving size is very misleading because we don’t use metric measurements in the U.S. and most people don’t have a clue what 34 grams would be.  Before I tell you how many cookies you can have, take a guess.  If you’re like most people, you think a serving is probably 5 or 6 cookies. You’d be wrong.  A serving size is only 3 cookies!

Left to guess how many cookies in a 34 gram serving, most people will overeat.  If you have 6 cookies, that’s 320 calories, 14 grams of fat, and 50 grams of carbs — the same nutrients you would eat in an entire meal.

By making the serving size small, the manufacturer disguises the true value of the food - after all, who eats just 3 Oreos?  Even more astonishing is the fact that the entire package has 15 servings - that’s 2400 calories and 105 grams of fat.

For foods that don’t have a nutrition label (fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meat, poultry, and fish), you can refer to the USDA Food Pyramid Guide for serving sizes.

Portion

Once you understand serving size, portions are very simple.  A portion is simply the number of servings you choose to eat.  In the example above, if you were to eat 6 cookies, your portion would be 2 servings.

You will often hear the term portion control. What that means is watching the number of servings you are eating.  If a serving is 1 cup and you eat a heaping cup full, you are probably eating 1 1/4 servings and need to account for the calories, fat, etc. accordingly.

A few tips on portion control:

• Be honest with yourself, if you are eating 1 1/4 servings, don’t try to justify it as 1 serving because you could fit it all in one cup by heaping it.
  
• When you plan your meals, make sure you know in advance how many servings of each food you will eat.  This will help keep you from over eating.



• One serving of lean meat is about the size of a deck of playing cards. For pasta, rice or potatoes, it’s about the size of a computer mouse.
• When eating out, ask for a to-go box when your food arrives and box up extra servings so you won’t be tempted to over eat.
• Eating a salad before lunch or dinner will help you to keep from overeating.  Feel free to load your salad up with fresh veggies but stay away from creamy high fat/high calorie dressings.  I usually opt for low fat or balsamic vinaigrette dressing.

The bottom line?  Use good common sense — know your serving sizes and control the portions you eat.  You are only hurting yourself when you cheat on servings and portions.

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